


Call Him Newt

by rimahadley



Category: Pacific Rim (2013)
Genre: Bipolar Newton Geiszler, Gen, Neurodivergent Newton Geiszler, Neurodiversity, Nonbinary Character, Nonbinary Newton Geiszler, Trans Character, this whole thing is about newt okay
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-11
Updated: 2016-01-11
Packaged: 2018-05-13 04:20:54
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,071
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5694523
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rimahadley/pseuds/rimahadley
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Newton Geiszler grows up, gets into MIT, and discovers he's not a girl.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Call Him Newt

"But what's _really_ the difference between boys and girls?" Newt remembered asking his father many times as a child. Of course, he hadn't called himself Newt yet, or even "he" (or "they," but "he" was usually more convenient). He'd called himself... well, that didn't matter. The name his parents had given him was irrelevant. His father had tried many times to explain to him the apparently deep and inherent differences between boys and girls, but Newt had always been left unsatisfied and generally confused. It just didn't make sense. He was supposed to be a girl, and he didn't know quite how to explain that felt wrong wrong _wrong_ , like the texture of wet rags or the smell of cigarettes or the sound of his third grade teacher's voice.

Newt was thirteen and in grade eight when he decided he was going to go to university early. School was so— frustrating, and lonely. He just wanted to _finish it_ , and move on. He knew he was smart enough. He just had to prove it to MIT. Or to some other school, he supposed, but he’d wanted to go to MIT for as long as he could remember. He spent hours on his Uncle Illia’s computer, looking at every single page on the MIT website. He looked at the application in grade nine, which was also sort of grade ten, and filled as much of it out as he could, just to practice. He spent as much of the day as possible practicing his English. He saved up for university biology textbooks and poured through them, trying to memorize it all. His obsession didn’t win him any friends, but it wasn’t like he had any to lose. Newt knew some of his teachers were concerned he was pushing himself too hard, and his father and uncle were worried about the fact that he was only sleeping maybe three hours a night, but Newt felt full of energy every day. His life was going exactly the way he wanted it to.

Next fall, during Newt’s final year in secondary school, Newt applied Early Action to MIT, and he just _knew_ he was going to get in. He was brilliant, and he’d worked really really hard and— his self esteem completely fell apart about a week after he submitted his application. He was useless, he was a failure, he needed to sleep _all the time_ , he’d burned himself out and he wasn’t even sixteen. What was he thinking, trying to go to university two years early? How could he have kidded himself into thinking he was smart enough to do _anything_ worthwhile with his life? He missed two weeks of school before he pulled himself back together enough to go back to class, and with his advanced schedule, that was really bad. He could hear his classmates whispering about him— or he thought he could, anyway. Maybe he was just imagining it. But he was imagining it _really well_. And besides that, boys kept _looking at him_ and he didn’t want them to, it felt wrong, in the same way that being a girl still did (and he’d hoped he’d grow out of that, he really had).

Just when Newt was completely falling into despair that anything in his life would ever get better, a cardboard tube arrived in the mail. His heart pounding, Newt carefully opened it up, not quite believing the tube was real. It _was_ his MIT admission. Newt let out a whoop so loud the cat screeched and ran under the couch, and his father came running into the kitchen. “I got in!” Newt screamed at his father, dancing around the kitchen table hugging the tube, “I got in, I got in, I got in!” His uncle came in too, and the three of them hugged fiercely. Newt felt like he was on top of the world again, and everything was fantastic.

It wasn’t quite that easy, of course. Newt still had to work extremely hard to make sure his final grades would be high enough to meet his standards, and he still needed more sleep than he had the year before. He knew his father and uncle were relieved by that last one, though he didn’t quite understand why. (He wouldn’t until he was in his second year at MIT, listening to his psychiatrist explain what “bipolar disorder” and “manic episodes” were.) But things were so much better than they had been just a few weeks ago that Newt didn’t really mind all the extra work he had to make up, or the fact that he wasn’t talking to any of his classmates anymore. He graduated just like he’d planned, with extremely high scores.

One day that summer Newt was scrolling through the MIT admissions blogs when he noticed one with a link to the MIT Nondiscrimination Statement. Somehow, he’d missed that page in all his prior trawlings of the website, so he clicked on it. “The Institute does not discriminate against individuals on the basis of race, color, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity—” Wait. Gender identity? That wasn’t a phrase he’d seen before. He looked it up, and found all sorts of references to transgender people— people who didn’t identify with the gender they’d been given when they were born. His heart and head pounding, Newt sat back from the computer. Was that him? Was that why he’d never felt comfortable as a girl? Because he wasn’t one? Was he a guy instead? That felt… a lot better (not perfect? but much closer). “He,” Newt whispered to himself, “he, him, his. I’m… I’m not a girl.”

Over the next few weeks, Newt frantically researched everything he could on gender identity and transgender people. He was only using he/him pronouns for himself now, but they sounded weird with his name. It occurred to him that he could probably pick a new one. He could have gone for something normal, like Alexander or Lukas, but those didn’t really seem all that interesting. So he started looking at scientists. Einstein was… too much. Same with Darwin and Mendel. But… Newton? He liked Newton. And he could use Newt as a nickname, and newts were a really interesting animal. “My name is Newton Geiszler. I’m Newton Geiszler. His name is Newton. Call me Newt!” Newt laughed, feeling a more profound sense of _relief_ than he had ever imagined. “Call me Newt.”


End file.
